Spell of Fate | Page 6

though. Max wasn't usually quite this testy, especially in the morning; he liked getting up early, and seemed to hit his stride right around the time the sun came out. Maybe Max did need practice. Max was always suspicious, but this morning he was out-and-out on edge. Something was putting him especially on his guard.
Max had produced a floppy, wide-brimmed hat of a piece with the rest of his ratty disguise. It was ratty only in appearance, though, not in effectiveness. If Jurtan met this fellow on the street he wouldn't give him a second look, except perhaps to make sure there was enough of a buffer space around to steer clear of him. As the trees thickened around them and the amount of morning light reaching them through the canopy of leaves declined, Jurtan thought he saw a pale pink glow begin to peek from beneath the brim of Max's headpiece.
Max settled his hat more firmly. While his hand was in place next to the brim, he slid his fingers underneath it and adjusted the control matrix above his right ear. Camouflage, Max thought, camouflage and subterfuge, always hiding one thing behind another; what a world. If we didn't have all this magic running loose, struggles of power and battles of will, it would probably be a much nicer place overall. But on the other hand it probably wouldn't. People were people and power, after all, was power. The enhancement disc in front of his right eye firmed and Max's overlay-view of the scene ahead of them settled down. Off to the left on the trunk of a tree was a squirrel. Between its bark-colored fur and the gloom of the lighting level it was all but invisible to the unaided eye, even once Max knew where to look. To the disc, though, painting the squirrel's body heat in a glowing orange, it might as well have been under a spotlight.
There were other animals out and about, too - a streak that could have been a fox, an assortment of birds, a few more squirrels. No larger game was in sight, though, and certainly nothing on two feet, unless they were using countermeasures. Screening aural emanations was a standard enough trick in the right circles, but heat signature suppression was still largely unheard of. Infrared sensors were such an obvious idea, too. Still, it was a fact that remote sensing never really seemed to catch on, like so many facets of magical technology that were deliberately subtle and designed to keep you out of trouble rather than blowing up situations with flash and pyrotechnics. Most practitioners weren't nearly as clever as they thought they were, and on top of that they'd didn't much like to do research. Of course, Max thought, there's research and there's research. Everybody liked to steal good stuff if they could. Their problem was that they went after it the hardest way, trying to lift the secrets of a living competitor, or reverse engineering back to a piece of left-over stagecraft from its residual fallout. It was safer all around and usually more productive to boot to mine where the guardians were dead.
When you wanted certain kinds of answers, though, going through ruins and books was nothing but a waste of time. Max glanced idly around again. There was someone around here laying for them, he could feel it. Beyond the matter of foiling whatever the somebody had in mind, the larger question was whether they were just freebooters out to waylay travelers in general or whether they had a particular target in mind. The options weren't exclusive, of course, if you were going to be logically comprehensive, since the kind of customers who'd ambush someone in particular in a forest probably were the sort who wouldn't mind an extra spot of fun and profit if someone else happened along while they were waiting.
Until proven otherwise, you had to assume every plot was directed at you personally. Even with this carefully cultivated paranoia, however, Max had to acknowledge that the most likely scenario here was the old scout-them-out-in-the-village, rip-them-off-in-the-forest routine, with the innkeeper in league with a few of the local toughs.
After all the waiting, when it happened the whole thing was there and over with almost as soon as it had started, in the typical disorganized flurry and commotion.
Max had unbent enough in his didacticism to warn Jurtan to stay alert and keep his eyes open. They had entered a section of forest where the path was both narrower and twistier than it really needed to be, and also happened to be snaking through a series of chest- and then head-high gullies. Reddening leaves covered the ground. It was, after all, fall, but it was still early in the season, and these were a